Bloggers — How to organize your time and life?

Organize with a goal in mind

Why bloggers and content writers should be bothered getting organized? We get organized to achieve great goals. We do not organize just to appeal to others and look good. We organize to delegate our time resources and achieve big goals.

Organizing systems are really vehicles to get you to your bigger goals. So you shouldn’t organize anything without asking why?

People don’t invest that kind of time or money in designing a system for their lives unless there is something they are trying to achieve. Very commonly, people want to organize their time and their schedules to create space for quality time with their families and quality time for themselves. That is a very common goal. If you were more organized, if your schedule was more organized, if your space was more organized, you would free up time to be present, with your friends, with your family, with your kids, with your spouse, and with yourself. That’s probably one of the most common motivations. Another in our work lives. I want to get organized, manage my time so that I can fulfill my greatest potential. If you’re bogged down with procrastination, or you’re always late and then you feel really guilty, so you’re not really confident, which means you don’t really show up and really throw in at meetings or with clients, but you kind of hold back because you feel incompetent or you feel embarrassed, you feel like behind the eight ball, then you’re missing opportunities. So it’s usually to really seize the maximum opportunities at work. Whether you work for yourself, or you work for a small company or a nonprofit or government or big company. It’s really to maximize your opportunities.

Organize like a kindergarten classroom

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video- [Interviewer] So if you’ve got over 30 years of experience as a professional organizer, for folks who’ve got some clutter in their lives, do you have any pro tips or tricks that you use over and over and over again that the rest of us, lay people, should know? – [Interviewee] Yeah, I think when it comes to organizing, I model every single physical organizing system on the model of a kindergarten classroom without exception. – No kidding. – [Interviewee] Yep. So you just picture a kindergarten classroom. It is the perfect model of organization. The room, imagine it. This is a room where you can have like 25 five-year-olds that within the first two weeks of school, no matter how messy that room gets, at the ring of a bell, everything is back in its home by five-year-olds, right? – [Interviewer] Yeah. – [Interviewee] So how is that room organized? It is organized into activity zones. There’s a reading area, a dress-up area, a building-blocks area, a music zone, right? And everything is stored at it’s point of view. So if you’re in the music zone, everything that is related to music is in there. There’s nothing on the other side of the room. If you’re in the arts-and-crafts zone and you’re painting a picture and you want to add glitter and glue, it’s right there in the arts-and-crafts zone. Even if there’s an empty shelf in the reading corner, no teacher would ever put arts and crafts in the reading zone. So it’s storing items at their point of views as related to an activity. And then everything’s stored in a container that is perfect for what you’re storing, right? So like puzzles are in those little slotted trays, and they’re very organized. The building-blocks area, there’s one cubby for the columns and another one for the rectangles and another one for the arches. And you just, everything is a home that’s perfect fit for what you’re putting away. And the whole room becomes kind of a visual menu of everything that’s important to the people who use that space. So like a kindergartner can just come in and look around and say, “What is there to do? Oh, I’m going to go over and build something.” And run over to that area. And that’s really how our homes and our offices and our filing systems, digital or in paper, should reflect who we are, and what we want, and where we’re going. They should reflect our activities and reflect our life back to us. It’s a very visual and very powerful and very effective way of organizing everything.

Tailor your system to your style

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video- Let’s talk about you’ve got a particular approach called the inside-out I guess method or approach or style or flavor. So can you walk us through, what is that and how do we do that? – Yeah, so organizing from the inside out is really about designing systems that reflect your unique personality, style and goals, so that it’s very natural and easy to maintain. And too often we try to organize from the outside-in, what does that look like? You just ask somebody else like, “Oh, which app do you use “for your to-dos or your calendar?” or, “You know, how many to-dos do you put in your list “for the day?” And or “How do you organize your closet?” And where we buy containers, and we buy tools and we think those tools are going to organize us, they don’t. You have to design your system the unique way you think and your natural habits so that you don’t have to change who you are to be organized but it actually enhances and unleashes your full potential and it works and it lasts, right? – Well, that sounds awesome. – Yeah. – Well can you give us an example maybe of, hey, given your context or your style or approach, you might want to choose A over B. – So one is people are like, where do I keep track of my to-dos, it’s one of the universal questions of today’s era, because there are so many options and our to-dos come at us from so many different directions. So people are like digital or paper, that’s the big first cut. So, usually I will ask people if they are to sort of identify, are you a visual tactile person, or you kind of a digital linear person? And a visual, tactile person will remember where on a page they wrote something. They’re like “Oh, that was like three pages back “in the upper right corner in green ink,” like they have a visual, tactile memory of where information is. And if you relate to that then you are probably best on a paper to-do system because the act of writing pen to paper emblazons it on your memory, helps you process in groups similar kinds of tasks and just writing it helps you process what you’re doing and if you try to do it digitally, it’s not sticky. So that’s like one cut and then if it’s paper, then you just have to sort of search through the various products that are out there. That’s one example. – Okay, so that’s intriguing and very descriptive. I think some people will say, “Yes, that’s me” and that’ll kind of resonate right away and so what would be the, yes, that’s me equivalent for those who are in the digital linear zone? – Yeah, I think people who are sort of digital linear thinkers can, very often, they’re kind of chronologic in their thinking, 

Three steps for organizing anything

Delegate your assignment

Can I delegate to someone else? Delegation refers to the assignment of responsibility for specific tasks from one person to another. Many fear delegating tasks to others because of various reasons. One is the lack of confidence because you do not trust someone of their skills and confidence. You enjoy completing certain projects so you do not want to delegate.

Whatever the reason, it’s important to continue honing the skills, as constantly refusing to delegate the assignment can have negative consequences. You will overload your schedule and prioritize the tasks with low importance. The team members may also miss important opportunities.

Schedule your most important tasks

Blogging at times can be stressful, boring, and exhaustive. Do not kill time, the scarest resource that we all have. Napoleon Bonaparte once said that space we can recover, but time never.

Scheduling is the art of planning your activities so that you can achieve your goals and priorities your assignment in the time available. Scheduling helps you achieve what you can do in a day, month, or year.

1. Identify the time that you can dedicate to blogging as compared to other relevant task of the day.
2. Scheduling help identifying and blocking non-essential task so that we can dedicate the time resource to those tasks which are important.
3. Scheduling help prioritize highly important tasks.
4. scheduling help bloggers identify contingency time to handle unpredictable events and interruptions from their blogging journey.
5. Bloggers can schedule the activities that address their priorities and personal goals in the time that is available.
6. Scheduling can be the key driver tio indetify the task that can be delegated.

It’s important that your schedule makes time for your professional and personal goals. If you have little or no discretionary time left when you reach step five, revisit your tasks to see if you can do them differently – otherwise, your work-life balance will suffer.

We have written in detail how scheduling can help bloggers.

Do not start your day with email.

“Lose an hour in the morning, and you will be all day hunting for it.”
-Richard Whately

Morning is the point of the day when our batteries of life are fully charged. We are relaxed and have regained our full strength after a full night’s sleep.

Email is a delivery mechanism for messages, requests, reminders, purchases, junk, and solicited messages. But in all, it is a reactive mechanism.

Ignorance is bliss. There could be so much that would have happened in the external world, and the worst would be interacting with those changes if those changes are not positive and can be the bearer of bad news. It could lead to stress and anxiety in the morning. I invest 1st hour of the morning in the most productive and creative work of the day.

Every day is a new opportunity to accomplish something personally or professionally. Investing in the right and most important things in the very first hour of the day will be a wise decision.

Batch process your email — Avoid constant engagement

A university in Britain carried out a study that studies the effect of batch processing of emails as compared to processing email with constant engagement throughout the day. It was a very extensive and well-conducted study.

The test was conducted by dividing people into two batches.

Sample One: They checked emails and their social media accounts for the entire day.

Sample Two: They checked their emails and social media accounts in batches across the day. Batch processing means dedicating only a certain amount of time: 20 minutes, 40 minutes, or 1 hour across the entire day. Maybe once, twice, or thrice.

The conclusion of the study was that the people who batch-processed their emails rather than constantly engaging in email tasks were able to invest less total time in their email management, yet were so productive in cleaning and delegating their emails, and were able to save so much time that can be utilized productively in other assignments.

Solve one problem at a time

For every blogger and creative artist, time is the scarest resource. We have to admit that we are mortals and we will not be there tomorrow. It is important to delegate different components of a day to facilitate an outcome. 

Optimize, and try to solve only one or two problems at a time. Don’t feel that you have to overhaul everything at the same time. It’s impossible. Just make a short punch list of things that need to be tooled or retooled and do them one at a time. 

We have 168 hours in a week. Near one-third of that will be lost in sleep. The remaining 112 hours. Try to identify tasks in daily chores that are consuming your time. Too much email checking, for example. Eliminate them. If you can’t eliminate them, minimize them. Every hour is interconnected. Balance one other will nourish more. Everything else lifts. The best is to eliminate unproductive chores and then do just one thing at a time.

You have taken the decision. Move forward.